Donald Trump live updates: President ‘named twice’ to FBI by Jeffrey Epstein accuser as he peddles Gabbard’s Obama conspiracy

President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal after the newspaper published the president’s alleged birthday card to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – but what will he have to prove to win the case?

The lawsuit filed in Miami federal court on Friday names the paper’s owners, including right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, as well as the paper’s parent companies, Dow Jones and News Corp, and two Wall Street Journal reporters, claiming they defamed Trump.

Weeks after the White House attempted to dismiss the so-called Epstein files as a Democratic “hoax,” the Journal published Trump’s alleged 50th birthday card message to Epstein. The 2003 note was described as including a sexually suggestive drawing and a birthday wish that read: “may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Isabel Keane has the story:

President Trump brushed off criticism over his administration’s handling of the Epstein case, instead boasting that he revived the U.S. from “DEAD” to the “hottest” country in the world within his first six months in office.

The U.S. talk show host has revealed that she and her wife Portia de Rossi moved to Britain because they happened to be visiting the Cotswolds when the Republican’s victory over Kamala Harris was confirmed last November.

“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, ‘He got in.’ And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here,’” she said.

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar compared Donald Trump’s attempt to pin the Epstein fallout on Democrats to Astronomer CEO Andy Byron blaming a cameraman for filming the viral Coldplay kiss-cam incident.

The 65-year-old Democrat pushed back at the assertion that her party was to blame on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning.

“The president blaming Democrats for this disaster, Jake, is like that CEO that got caught on camera blaming Coldplay,” Klobuchar told Jake Tapper.

“OK, like this is his making. He was president when Epstein got indicted for these charges and went to prison. He was president when Epstein committed suicide.”

A former attorney for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein says his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, should be granted immunity so she can testify about his crimes.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Epstein’s ex-lawyer Alan Dershowitz said Maxwell “absolutely” should testify as she was most closely involved with Epstein.

“She knows everything. I mean, she is everything,” Dershowitz said.

“She was the one who arranged all the trips and travel of all the people who went to the island, who went to the house and went to the place in New Mexico, who went to his place in Paris,” Dershowitz said of Maxwell.

Isabel Keane has the details:

Just days after the Wall Street Journal’s bombshell report accusing Trump of penning a bawdy 50th birthday card to Epstein, the president has again lashed out at the newspaper.

The Journal reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was the one who made the case to Trump against firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

But the president has denied the reporting, claiming: “People don’t explain it to me, I explain to them!”

“The Wall Street Journal ran a typically untruthful story today by saying that Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, explained to me that firing Jerome “Too Late” Powell, the Worst Federal Reserve Chairman in History, would be bad for the Market,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.

“Nobody had to explain that to me. I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. If it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”

Donald Trump’s political rivals seemed unshaken by his attempts to pin blame on them for the fallout over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation this weekend.

As the president and his allies leveled allegations about the Biden Justice Department supposedly tampering with evidence to link Trump to the convicted pedophile, Democrats remained fixed on calling for the full release of the Justice Department’s cache of evidence and investigation.

Even as news broke this past week that Trump had instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release grand jury testimony from the investigations into Epstein and his mistress, those same Democrats called the move an attempt to cover up the president’s involvement, given that it constituted less than full transparency.

Washington, D.C. correspondent John Bowden has more:

After years of peddling conspiracy theories about the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Donald Trump is now attempting to shift focus away from the case and his relationship with the convicted sex offender.

The Trump administration continues to face backlash after a Department of Justice and FBI memo released last week stated that there was no evidence that the disgraced financier, who socialised with royalty and celebrities and was accused of running a large network of underage girls for sex, had a “client list.”

Over the years, however, thousands of pages of records have been released through lawsuits, Epstein’s criminal dockets, public disclosures, and Freedom of Information Act requests.

While judges, court staff, and legal representatives are excluded, here are some of the names that do appear in the legal records connected to Epstein:

Donald Trump has posted a bizarre AI-generated video of former President Barack Obama being arrested and thrown in jail.

The president, still mired in controversy over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, posted the clip on his Truth Social platform on Sunday, taken from TikTok, in which the Democrat is seen declaring in a rally speech that “no one is above the law.”

He is then seen being handcuffed by law enforcement during an Oval Office sitdown with a grinning Trump, created using real footage of the two men meeting at the White House in November 2016 when the Republican was president-elect and Obama was about to leave office.

The Democrat is then led away and subsequently seen wearing an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison, all of which is soundtracked by The Village People’s 1970s disco anthem YMCA, which has (bizarrely) become Trump’s unofficial anthem.